Open For All, Bing AI Is A One Stop Solution To All Queries

Three months after unveiling the new AI-powered Microsoft Bing and Edge, Microsoft opened further access to Bing's AI features by moving from limited preview to open preview and eliminating the waitlist for trial on May 4. In a move to enhance the visual experience of users, Bing is "making search more visual" by introducing richer, more visual answers including charts and graphs and updated formatting of answers.

New features to make chat more productive and visually immersive, enhanced integration between Bing and @MicrosoftEdge, and expanded access to everyone around the world.

- Bing (@bing) May 4, 2023

Bing AI Visual Interface

Bing AI and ChatGPT are both based on the GPT language model developed by OpenAI. From creating a 3-course menu to writing a rhyming poem, the AI-powered Bing claims to provide better answers to complex questions. We used Bing AI to assess if it is one of the better AI-powered chatbots available and if it delivers on the mentioned features.

Cites Sources

Bing AI is able to deliver quick responses, alongside citing accurate sources for every generated answer. It also lets the user to go the website, by simply tapping on the answers if they wish to know more about a response. One can see links to the web content it references at the bottom of the response.

Image and Question Prompts

Bing AI not only shares detailed responses but also provides additional follow-up question prompts at the end of every response. You can choose a question from the provided options or ask a distinct question of your choice. Image prompts are also shared based on the query with every response to enhance user experience.

Conversation Style

While Chat GPT is known for its elaborate and explanatory responses, Bing AI usually gives more concise answers. Moreover, Bing allows the user to choose among 'creative', 'balanced' and 'precise' styles. Depending on the query, one can decide whether they want to have a straightforward conversation or an imaginative and friendly chat. When we asked Bing AI to write a rhyming poem "explaining the Avengers plot", the creative style gave the best response.

Rhyming poem written in Bing AI's 'Creative' mode

Rhyming poem written in Bing AI's 'Precise' mode

On the other hand, for mathematical operations or coding queries, while the 'precise' style resulted in a better and more succinct response, the 'balanced' response might be a better option for understanding purposes.  On asking Bing to write a C++ program to find the largest number among three numbers, the 'creative' mode produced a lengthier code in comparison to the other two modes.

The most accurate response was given by the 'precise' style as it included decimal numbers as well, whereas the 'balanced' and 'creative' styles included only whole numbers.

C++ code in 'precise' style

However, for someone who is trying to understand the code, the 'balanced' style might be a more suitable option as it resulted in a shorter code along with an explanation and cited sources,

C++ code in 'balanced' style

Reasoning Capabilities- Effective But Not Reliable

Bing AI is able to provide solutions to the most complex reasoning questions. However, it isn't completely reliable as for some questions it failed to provide an accurate response even in its 'precise' style.

Precise style

Another drawback we encountered while testing its reasoning capabilities in the 'balanced' style is that it sometimes failed to learn from its previous response and kept generating the same answers.

Can Bing AI differentiate fake from fact?

When we asked Bing AI about multiple misleading claims, it was successfully able to identify the context of quotes and fact-check almost all of them. Even when we changed the input, Bing AI gave accurate outputs.

Nevertheless, as highlighted by Microsoft AI can make mistakes, and third-party content on the internet may not always be accurate or reliable. To avoid consuming incomplete, inaccurate, or inappropriate information, it is always recommended to double-check the facts before making decisions or taking action based on Bing's responses.

Bing Image Creator

Bing AI chat is now also capable of creating images from scratch in creative mode, after the integration of Bing Image Creator. For example, when the user provides an input, "Create an image of a dog on a unicycle", it takes a few seconds to create multiple samples.

Once the images are generated, they are visible in the chatbox. They can also be viewed and downloaded independently by the users.

According to Microsoft, Bing is working on incorporating visual search in chat so that users are able to upload images and search the web for related content. Additionally, users will also be able to see the chat history in the coming days on Bing as well, just like ChatGPT.